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Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Any day I can play Heirs to the Lost World is a great day! Saturday morning at Con of the North was one of those days last weekend! It is a fast-paced, easy-to-learn RPG with the best stunting rules of any RPG I have played.

Heirs to the Lost World is an alternative history RPG set in a 17th Century RPG with Aztecs, Mayans, Europeans, maroons, and pirates! The game is very immersive; it is both faithful to the peoples it portrays while being as fun as hell to play!

Designer Chad Davidson ran an adventure called Caravan of the High Plateau. The PCs were a mixed caravan of Port Royal pirates and Aztec pochteca. We were charged by Moctezuma with transporting several cannon and barrels of gunpowder overland and into the core of the Aztec Empire. Moctezuma's idea was to begin acquiring the weapons required to even the odds against the Spanish.

My character was one of the pirates who had brought the cannons and powder from Port Royal. I was of African descent and a priest of Ogun: just the person to help transport cannon and gunpowder! As soon as the Spanish first attacked the caravan, I summoned Ogun and had him ride me. This made me much less vulnerable to injury, including from firearms.

A Spaniard on horseback is about to be jumped by an Aztec Jaguar Knight

I had access to "standard" Voudoun spells/rituals which are part of the character build for a priest of Ogun. But during the game I chose to create spells on the fly using Heirs to the Lost World's wager-based stunting mechanics. Early in the first battle, I "fired" on the enemy by spitting magical shot out of my mouth; the teeth used to create the shot would grow back... in a few days. A bit later, I used a rather ribald ritual to load a cannon with magical shot.

The Spanish of course got wind of the operation (the Aztec's native "allies" from other tribes can be somewhat... unreliable) and so our troubles began. The action ended in the caverns below a defiled temple of Huitzilopochtli fighting a giant Fire Spider that had been summoned by disloyal vassals.

Defeating the creature was a challenge.

We prevailed.

I'd like to be playing (or running) this game a bit more often than once or twice per year!